"Colonel Tom Parker" == Andreas Conelis van Kuijk
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Dolly Parton's passing inspired Josh Marshall to dive deeper into one of the adjacent "Mysteries of Americana", namely how Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk "hopped off a ship in New York City" at the age of 20, in 1929, and eventually managed to set himself up as Elvis Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker, a "cigar-chomping, hard-charging good ole boy, someone out of central casting or perhaps a comic book", allegedly born in West Virginia rather than in Breda.
Marshall's focus is linguistic: "How is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona? He had a Dutch accent, albeit a relatively mild one. "
[H]ow did Parker pull this off? I had to figure this out. So over the weekend I chased this mystery down a true rabbit hole. The answer, to me at least, was as fascinating as the mystery. He kind of didn’t hide it. He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did have was affect and he got people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or speech impediment. This also seem to be the reason he came with a fraudulent backstory about being born in West Virginia, despite the fact that his professional life was all around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee. First, West Virginia is fairly far from those states in the Lower Mississippi Valley and second, there are all sort of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects. So if anyone ever thought or said, “Well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, don’t he?” The answer would just be, “Well, he has some kind of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where he’s from and also he’s got a lisp. So just let it go.”
Marshall offers links to a copy of interviews with Parker on Youtube, so you can judge for yourself:
Seonachan said,
September 1, 2026 @ 9:18 pm
As someone with a barely rudimentary knowledge of Dutch, picked up from a brief sojourn in Amsterdam decades ago, I am far from an expert, but I wouldn’’t have pegged his accent as Dutch without being primed to hear it as such. Even with that prompting, I didn’t hear anything really obviously Dutch, though some phrasings do seem to at least give him away as a non-native English speaker. If I went into those clips blind, I might have guessed he grew up in a German-speaking enclave in North America, like Lawrence Welk.
For me, the real mystery is why Tom Hanks adopted a much thicker and weirder German-ish accent for his portrayal of Parker in the recent Elvis biopic.
AntC said,
September 1, 2026 @ 9:56 pm
Aww, it used to be of no importance/indeed something exotic to be in the country illegally. You might (for example) get to marry a future President — despite (or perhaps because of) an excruciating thick accent.
Then I'm surprised he didn't fake more of a Southern twang and lexicon y'all.
bks said,
September 2, 2026 @ 5:47 am
Sounds like East Coast with COPD to me.
Andrew Usher said,
September 2, 2026 @ 7:48 am
Unfortunately, I must now divert myself to reply to something else that should not stand: AntC wrote
and as this post didn't mention Trump, nor have any conceivable relation to him, nor did that do anything whatever to address the post here, there's no excuse for that. No less, while some serious comment might have been made on that specific matter, he chooses to redirect it to one that can't at all be considered serious in the sense of making any point that can be replied to. Taking his factual assumption at face value – I consider it too unimportant to check – Trump is hardly unique even today for marrying a woman with a 'thick accent', or even one with limited English proficiency, or even (to whatever extent one defines it) 'in the country illegally'.
No, that post was simply injecting an attack on Trump where it least belongs, and functionally a troll. His attempt in the last sentence to address the linguistic issue is utterly inappropriate as well as his question was just answered above – now I don't think it wrong in itself to disagree with the OP (indeed many things may be posted to invite constructive criticism), if doing so one should at least be decent enough to indicate that that's what you are consciously doing, and to give some reason. He did neither, as if unable to move from his blind hatred of Trump into thinking about anything coherent.
I on the other hand will acknowledge not on this time being able to address the intended topic as it should be.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 2, 2026 @ 8:31 am
For a variety of historical reasons, the nation-of-origin quota restrictions imposed by U.S. immigration law in the 1920's on would-be arrivals from outside the Americas did not match up very well with supply and demand. For some parts of Europe (e.g. Poland or Italy) there were many many more would-be immigrants than there were legal slots available, but for others (like the Netherlands, at least according to google's dubious AI software) the quota of available slots for 1929 was not fully utilized. So unless he had some obvious defect like an affinity for polygamy or anarcho-syndicalism, Parker-to-be could have probably immigrated legally if he had been inclined by temperament to be more organized and paperwork-oriented than he apparently was. But as the story suggests, not having done the paperwork right up front may have made things awkward 20 or 30 years later and Parker apparently preferred not to undergo the hassle of trying to formally regularize the situation.
DCBob said,
September 2, 2026 @ 12:05 pm
That's a tremendous story. I'd never heard Parker and had no idea. Yeah, when you listen closely, his accent isn't obvious, and it certainly doesn't sound like it's from anywhere in West Virginia. But I can imagine that people in the deep South wouldn't necessarily find it odd that he was from "somewhere" in Appalachia.
cameron said,
September 2, 2026 @ 7:03 pm
that he was able to pass himself as a native speaker was impressive, but the most probable reason for him not going for the full formal immigration procedure was that he was wanted for murder back in the Netherlands
M. Paul Shore said,
September 3, 2026 @ 9:09 am
I’d give Parker/van Kuijk’s impersonation of a native English speaker a grade of 98 or 99 out of 100. He may have been a scoundrel of sorts, but he also seems to have had a truly spectacular gift for language learning. Compare his accomplishment to the phonetically feeble English-learning accomplishments of so many foreign-raised great intellects who went through their careers in the Anglosphere with thick, never-improving accents. Another conspicuous example of the compartmentalization of human brain function.
That said, it is true that the Dutch and the Germanic Scandinavians are, at least currently, probably the best learners of English as a second language in the world. How far back in history does that pattern extend? Was Parker/van Kuijk a beneficiary of it during his school days in the 1910’s and 1920’s (he was born in 1909)?
Bob Ladd said,
September 3, 2026 @ 10:25 am
@ M Paul Shore:
I completely agree with the grade of 98 or 99/100 that you awarded in this case, but I think that the present-day English-speaking abilities of native speakers of Dutch and "Germanic Scandinavians" are largely a consequence of post-WW2 cultural, economic, and geo-political developments. Obviously, regardless of cultural context and teaching methods, speakers of those languages are going to have something of a head start on English, but I'm pretty sure that before WW2 French and German featured more heavily than English in school curricula in the relevant countries.
KeithB said,
September 3, 2026 @ 11:47 am
"He may have been a scoundrel of sorts"
Priscilla Presley at Col. Tom Parker's funeral:
"Elvis and the Colonel made history together, and the world is richer, better and far more interesting because of their collaboration. And now I need to locate my wallet, because I noticed there was no ticket booth on the way in here, but I'm sure that the Colonel must have arranged for some toll on the way out."[
J.W. Brewer said,
September 3, 2026 @ 12:19 pm
@KeithB: the quote frequently attributed to the Colonel is ""When I met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of talent. Now he has a million dollars." Colonel-critics say that with the implicature that the talent itself was squandered or dissipated upon being transformed into money, but that's not the only permissible reading.
Also the anecdote that upon Elvis being invited to perform at the White House (I think during the Nixon years?), Col. Tom told the relevant staffer that Elvis was honored by the invitation, could be available with his band on the requested date, and that his fee would such-and-such (maybe $50K?). Which led to a shocked gasp and a protest by the staffer that no one asked for money when playing for the President, to which the Colonel responded "Well, I don't know about that, son, but no one asks Elvis Presley to play for free."
Jerry Packard said,
September 3, 2026 @ 2:43 pm
@Andrew Usher
“…there's no excuse for that. No less, while some serious comment might have been made on that specific matter, he chooses to redirect it to one that can't at all be considered serious in the sense of making any point that can be replied to. Taking his factual assumption at face value – …”
Such a castigation! I thought it a clever riposte employed as a deictic metaphor, cleverly referring back in time to a meme and structure with which it solidly connects! Especially the immigration segment, which refers to timely linguistic ambiguity and reference. Although I must admit, my linguistic sensitivity and perhaps judgment here may well be affected by my political leanings! Label that sociolinguistic, please!
Jerry Packard said,
September 3, 2026 @ 2:57 pm
“When I met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of talent. Now he has a million dollars."
Funny, I took it to mean, perhaps as intended, ‘Elvis has the talent – I convert it to $$’
KevinM said,
September 4, 2026 @ 1:05 pm
Well, half a million. Unbelievably, Parker's commission was 50% on most of Elvis's earnings.
David Marjanović said,
September 4, 2026 @ 1:14 pm
In the first video, his /ʃ/ is very noticeably Dutch every time, but then I have next to no experience with Appalachia; just read yesterday that there are people somewhere there who turn /ʃr/ into /sr/, so maybe his /ʃ/ is actually in the Appalachian range…
Also, in the first video but not the second, almost no aspiration, reliable voicing of /b d/, and the flaps don't come out right (they seem to be replaced by [d] and [n]). In the second, dirt has a sequence of [ɜ] followed by [ɹ]; that, too, seems unusual for America.
The rest seems perfect. Even negative concord: "there was never no plan".
Rodger C said,
September 5, 2026 @ 9:49 am
My mother always served us srimp.
Andrew Usher said,
September 6, 2026 @ 10:00 pm
My summary:
Even after learning that he should, he doesn't really sound like he has a 'foreign accent'. It's more like he sounds generally American with individual strange pronunciations thrown in, which I realise is not a real distinction, but only in my mind; still, it's important – to allude to a point mentioned above, were I to cast him in a movie, I certainly wouldn't want to give him a foreign accent (but if the actor were able to duplicate his peculiarities in an otherwise American accent, that would be fine).
Yes, one could say his near-native speech is quite good absolutely – but I'm not sure how surprising that should be. The fact that he'd apparently deliberately practiced it and had good reason to try to sound native means he wouldn't be likely to retain a strong accent – and compare Europeans today, most but not all of whom speak English with a similarly good accent, sometimes even if their imperfect fluency gives them away.
The features David Marjanovic noted are there, as much as I can hear, but are not those that I would notice (and probably I'm not unlike a typical native speaker) – the most noticeable ones are not only acoustically clear but either are never used by native speakers, or are differentiators between native accents. In the first category, the most clear is his devoicing of final /z/ – no English devoices fricatives, and it's not very subtle – but perhaps that's part of the 'lisp' referred to.
In the second, one hears his repeated near-monophthongal MOUTH vowel in 'down'; this is a distinctive regionalism (associated with Pittsburgh), and may once have extended into WV though apparently it doesn't today – I'd guess he added this deliberately, as it's not likely to be something an English learner would naturally do. This may or may not be true for the double-negative constructions noted – they could be picked up naturally. He seems less than fully rhotic, though that's unremarkable for an American of his generation that had lived anywhere around the South or East.
Because his speech was intended to 'fool' Americans, to the extent it was designed to fool anybody, its perception by Americans is what's notable and so I tried to go on at some length.
Last, I acknowledge Jerry Packard's having replied to my first post, but unfortunately can make little sense of it, not knowing whether it is sarcasm. I'm sure he's right about the "million dollars" quote; that's the most natural interpretation and Parker wouldn't disparage himself seriously.
Jerry Packard said,
September 7, 2026 @ 6:48 am
@Andrew Usher
It was indeed playful sarcasm, but I was making a serious point, which was that I felt you were being too critical of the implied political content of your interlocutor, and I was using linguistic analysis and terminology to say that I personally did not feel that the interlocutor had behaved inappropriately and crossed the line from linguistic to overly political commentary.
Andrew Usher said,
September 9, 2026 @ 7:25 pm
If I agreed, I would of course not have made that long comment. He has a history of doing such things in many threads here (and knowing it I can't help feel it's a matter of general anti-Americanism and Trump just makes an easy target) made me feel compelled to finally say enough; and as I alluded to his linguistic commentary (to use your word) here seemed only perfunctory.
On the other hand, my post on the subject immediately above, made after some thought and many listenings to the clips, can be accused of no such thing.
Lane said,
September 15, 2026 @ 8:21 am
"Tom"'s accent is indeed remarkable. I notice a "dis" and "dat" for "this" and "that", but that's about the only Dutch trait I hear, and I know the Dutch accent pretty well. And there are enough Americans who say "dis and dat" for this to have easily flown under the radar.
Whereas Tom Hanks apparently thought he had to Dutch it up to play Tom in Baz Lurhmann's movie, resulting in an accent people called "Kentucky Fried Goldfinger". I happen to have interviewed his accent coach once. He's a smart man, linguistically very astute. So I can only say I don't blame him.